In these times of self-flagellation in America, visiting abroad can give you perspective and make you see immediately the good things you left behind, as well as the bad.

Here goes:

1. Americans have a strong civic sense. There may be only handful of expats in a city, but you can be sure they already have a weekly meeting set up, a forum on the web, everyone’s emails and phone numbers, and a network of support and advice.

2. Americans – at least the ones I meet abroad – are helpful. They talk. They exchange ideas and emails. They are more cooperative than many other groups, it seems. (On the other hand, this could just be because I’m most at home with English…)

3. America is one of the cleanest societies around.

Poverty, over-population, and poor infrastructure can certainly explain some of the filth in India. Maybe even a lot. But ultimately, there’s a failure of culture. I know this because I’ve seen even middle-class Indians, who have money for elaborate decoration in their homes, display complete indifference to minimal standards of hygiene when it comes to public space. Cleaning up after yourself in public space and respecting the other fellow’s right to be free of noise and filth are things noticeably absent. Curiously, this goes hand in hand with quite a high level of personal cleanliness, even among people on the street.

In Buenos Aires, even middle-class neighborhoods that ought to be immaculate have litter on the streets. Yet the people dress fashionably for even small outings to the store. People often decry Americans as too informal. But to me there’s something wrong-headed about putting on make-up to go to the store, but dropping litter on the streets…

4. Americans are organized. America may be the country with the most..and best..signs. It seems like a trivial thing. Try living some place where you can’t tell where you’re going for miles. Every road in the country has clear and comprehensive information about every possible turn, angle, and destination on the way. Buildings are labeled clearly. Streets and numbers makes sense. At least, mostly. It’s something we take for granted in the country, but it’s actually probably one of the main reasons why it’s easy to run a business here. The same systematic approach characterizes the office desks, the filing systems, the realtor’s networks, the business directories. It’s easy to find you way here..and it’s easy to find whatever it is you’re looking for. America is the great connector.

5. Americans are genuinely multi-ethnic and PC. Why does PC count as a good thing? Well, there’s bad PC and there’s good PC. The fact is, in America, you can be practically any race or color. People aren’t going to stop and stare – at least not in major cities. Not unless you wear something terribly different from ordinary street wear.

On the other hand, an American traveler who’d just returned from India was telling us how many stares she provoked when she was traveling…and not just stares (which might be understandable), but hassles…scams…

And a young Guyanese friend told me she was stared at constantly in Montevideo when she walked out. There is an African population in the city – in Barrio Sur – so you’d think people would be used to a different look. On the other hand, my friend is a very pretty girl, and it’s possible she mistook admiration for rudeness or uncivility…..

Food for thought for libertarians on the run..

A few months ago when I suggested that the Madoff business might have ties to extensive money laundering involving Jewish philanthropies and religious charities and that some of the money involved must have been from Israel – I was met with thundering silence. A couple of interviews of mine also got taken off the web.

But I wasn’t so far off was I? Here’s a sting that’s landed a whole raft of money laundering rabbis in Brooklyn and New Jersey…only one of the most corrupt states in the US. The Jon Corzine mentioned, by the way, is a former US senator and a Goldman Sachs honcho. Goldman people can be found at high levels through the New Jersey political system…

From the New York Times:

“The authorities laid out two separate schemes, one involving money laundering that led to rabbis and members of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and in the Jersey Shore town of Deal, where many of them have summer homes. The other dealt with political corruption and bribery and involved public officials mostly in Jersey City and Hoboken, where the pace of development has been particularly intense in recent years.

Linking the two schemes was the federal informant who was not named in court papers but whom people involved with the investigation identified as Solomon Dwek, a failed real estate developer and philanthropist who was arrested in May 2006 on charges of passing a bad $25 million check at a bank in Monmouth County, N.J.

Early on, Mr. Dwek helped investigators penetrate an extensive network of money laundering that involved rabbis in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the Syrian Jewish community is based, and in Deal and Elberon, towns on the Jersey Shore.

Mr. Dwek, a well-known member of the Syrian Jewish community whose parents founded the Deal Yeshiva, never concealed that he was facing bank fraud charges, instead telling targets, who included three rabbis in Brooklyn and two in New Jersey, that he was bankrupt and trying to conceal his assets, according to people involved in the case. The targets, in turn, accepted bank checks Mr. Dwek made out to charities that they oversaw, deducted a fee, and returned the rest to him in cash.

Much of the cash they provided him came from Israel, and some of that in turn came from a Swiss banker, prosecutors said. All told, some $3 million was laundered for Mr. Dwek since June 2007, prosecutors said..”

Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to
All Persons of European Descent

Whereas, Europeans kept my forebears in bondage some three centuries toiling without pay,

Whereas, Europeans ignored the human rights pledges of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution,

Whereas, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments meant little more than empty words,

Therefore, Americans of European ancestry are guilty of great crimes against my ancestors and their progeny.

But, in the recognition that Europeans themselves have been victims of various and sundry human rights violations to wit: the Norman Conquest, the Irish Potato Famine, Decline of the Hapsburg Dynasty, Napoleonic and Czarist adventurism, and gratuitous insults and speculations about the intelligence of Europeans of Polish descent,

I, Walter E. Williams, do declare full and general amnesty and pardon to all persons of European ancestry, for both their own grievances, and those of their forebears, against my people.

Therefore, from this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry.

Walter E. Williams, Gracious and Generous Grantor

A trenchant summing up of the uselessness of most jobs programs by Jim Bovard:

“Advocates claim that job programs give kids lessons that will change their lives, but the lessons are often of doubtful value. The Tulare County, Calif. summer-job program provides kids with “workshops on safety, ethics and life skills” — as well as “referrals to armed services.”

True, there are things more absurd than government agencies’ paying teens for a day to learn how to find and keep a job. But the highlight of a job-preparation “summit” in Orlando, Fla., was a motivational speaker named Marvellous Mark, whose slogan is “Opportunity Rocks.” According to Workforce Central Florida (a successor to state unemployment offices, which also dispense federal job-training funds in the area), Marvellous Mark’s presentation “is based on this simple premise: The qualities successful rock stars have are also found in every successful worker.”

The key thing kids should learn from their first jobs is to produce enough value that someone will voluntarily pay them a wage. But the goal for summer-job programs is often simply to make kids feel good about themselves. Many programs bend over backward to avoid firing kids, regardless of their behavior. The D.C. program last year continued paying almost 2,000 kids long after they had achieved a record of perfect absenteeism.

Politicians brag that government-funded summer jobs helps kids get a foot into the labor market. However, the federal hiring criteria for this year’s program could affix a scarlet letter on youths later seeking real private jobs. Most kids who receive a federally subsidized summer job must possess at least one “barrier” to employment, such as being a school dropout, pregnant, criminal offender, runaway, homeless or deficient in “basic skills.”

The precedents don’t bode well. In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences reported that the summer-job program failed to reduce the crime rate among participants. As for the economics, a Health and Human Services Department-funded study of summer-job programs in the 1980s by two Harvard University professors concluded that “roughly 40% of jobs simply displace private employment” for minority youth.

Discouraging History

Forty years ago, the General Accounting Office condemned federal summer-job programs because youth “regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.” In 1979, GAO reported that the vast majority of urban teens in the program “were exposed to a worksite where good work habits were not learned or reinforced, or realistic ideas on expectations in the real world of work were not fostered.” Persistent negative evaluations eventually convinced Congress to terminate federal funding in the late 1990s.

The federal government has run more than 100 different job-training programs since the 1960s — dozens of them targeted at youth — but has consistently betrayed people who trusted Uncle Sam to give them marketable skills. An Urban Institute study found that participation in the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1974-’83) produced “significant earnings losses for young men of all races.” And a 1992 U.S. Labor Department study concluded that federal training “actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths.”

There is no reason to imagine that the revived summer-job programs will be less harmful than previous ones. “Make work” and “fake work” are a grave disservice to young people. American teenagers should not be sacrificed on an altar of political photo opportunities….”

Read the rest of this at Jim Bovard’s blog.

My Comment:

Bovard documents his point pretty well in this post. So my comment is going to be more general.

Massaging self-esteem is the logical result when society as a whole refuses to allow “value judgment” of actions and behavior. You might think that this refusal to judge is confined to those liberals who simply can’t bring themselves to notice the bad behavior that welfare programs often incentivize. You’d be wrong. A lot of libertarians subscribe to some form of it.

For them, making a judgment is confused with “being judgmental,” in the negative sense. We are told that this judgmentalism is what’s wrong with society.

Actually, and this is often the case, we have too much of what we think we lack, and what we think we have too much of turns out to be completely lacking.

We lack judgment ourselves and we discourage its cultivation in our young people. I won’t spend this post explaining where and how this peculiar attitude developed. Some of it can be blamed on the New Age with its strange cross-breeding of neo-Hindu/neo-Buddhist thinking with American pragmatism and home-spun prosperity gospels..

This school of thought refuses to believe in the existence of material facts, unpleasant limitations, or real physical bodies. Everything is mental. Variations of this mindset abound in New Age literature – a perfect illustration being the block-buster movie about the “Law of Attraction” – “The Secret.”

The New Age minus the discipline of systematic thought and rational ethics gives us the kind of mentality which produced credit derivatives – debt forever with never a creditor paid back. In fact, the whole credit bubble perfectly illustrates what’s wrong with “non-judgmentalism”. It was telling (to me) that many on the left, who until then had never had any use for Jesus or the Gospel, were quick to trot him out when it came to “forgive us our debts.”

Non-judgmentalism gives us value-free education, jobs without productive work, journalism as stenography, off-balance sheets and on-balance debt, contrition as public performance, and every other economic and non-economic sin that has brought the country to its knees.

The topic bears much more examination, but I’d rather wander out onto the rambla just now and watch the waves – looking rather brown and muddy today – beat against the city. Living next to the sea has its uses. The city, man’s puny hive, is put in its proper place against the infinite, rhythmic chaos of nature – a chaos of higher order and meaning than anything humans can create. The waves have no pretensions. They suck at the beach,  and grind down the sand and the rocks. There’s no escape from the tides – now in, now out.

Only man would try to create – or think it worth creating – a tide that always came in and never went out….

A clever piece on the latest in Depression fashion:

(I have no idea why this link went to an article on Michael Jackson’s death. I just spotted it and changed it back – June, 2o14.)

“Falcinelli describes the sensibility currently in vogue—and certainly on display in his restaurants—as a throwback to pre-industrial times, when regular folks actually knew how to make things with their hands. “People are always like, ‘What’s the dope shit right now?'” he says. “Well, the dope shit now is 120 years ago.” So cure your own boar prosciutto. Grow a beard. Go back to the land behind your remodeled seven-figure townhouse.

The retro aesthetic carries over to hooch, which would seem as recessionproof as any consumable. Good-bye, $300 worth of bottle-service vodka in the back corner of a velvet-rope warehouse; hello, $300 worth of single-malt-and-Chartreuse Depression-era cocktails mixed by a mustachioed dude wearing an arm garter. “Sure, there can be a certain level of snobbery,” says Alex Day, who has opened a string of thriving high-end speakeasylike lounges around the country, including Death & Co. in New York. “The bankers who come here never identify themselves as bankers—they don’t like to talk about it.”

So take heed, deposed hedgies aching to splurge with what’s left of your severances: Let that layoff beard get as tangled and bushy as you want—Jenulence makes a nifty hazelnut-and-cedarwood-infused conditioner for a mere $28—then spend away. It’s okay: You’re part of the poorgeoisie—no one will say a word…”

Virginia Tech was in the news today. Cho´s mental health records turned up at the home of the director of Virginia Tech´s student clinic – where they´d been for two years while people were searching for them. It´s taken a lawsuit to find them.

It´s interesting that the Kaine commission never turned them up. It didn´t even investigate the director.

As readers of this blog know, I was the first person to suspect V Tech of gross negligence and a cover-up of what happened. I also noted that  it was highly likely that Cho was being given drugs and that there was more to his mental history, which the university was probably concealing.

(You can check out my articles on this site, as well as my blog posts, through the search tab).

It´s satisfying to be vindicated after I got all that nasty mail for “attacking” ‘nice’ university administrators.

“Nice” isn´t good.  Good takes a whole lot more effort .

AP reports:

“Why would he (Miller) take any student mental health records to his home at any time, and why that student?” Robert T. Hall said.

“It certainly is a question of whether there is more to the Seung-Hui Cho mental health history than we’ve been told,” Hall said.

Kaine said he was dismayed that it took two years to find the records.

“That is part of the investigation that I am very interested in and, of course, I’m very concerned about that,” Kaine said.

The discovery calls into question the thoroughness of the ongoing criminal probe and the findings of the Virginia Tech Review Panel, a commission Kaine appointed to review the catastrophe, one victim’s relative said.

“Deception comes to my mind in my first response,” said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured.

“To say it doesn’t make sense is an injustice,” she said. “It gives me the impression: ‘What else are they hiding?'”

While a large part of the shooting investigation focused on how university officials and law enforcement responded following the first reports of two deaths in a dormitory, family members of victims have also inquired how the troubled Cho slipped through the cracks at university counseling.

Miller was not listed among the more than 200 people interviewed by the panel. The leader of the investigation, former Virginia State Police Superintendent Gerald Massengill, said Wednesday that investigators interviewed Miller’s successor at Cook Counseling Center, Dr. Christopher Flynn, but not Miller….”

Funny, huh?

Check out Psych Time Line, one of scores of posts on V-Tech. You can get some of the posts by googling V-Tech and Lila Rajiva directly.

The rest can be viewed via the search function. You can also just search the archives for April 2007 and the months thereafter.

I contacted a couple of lawyers who were interested in the case and offered them the information on my blog. One of the victims´relatives was also in contact with me, because she felt strongly that what was happening was a cover-up. I thought so too, but I was involved with financial writing at the time and I couldn´t follow up. Besides, I was sure the students´lawsuits would turn up new evidence.
Which is what happened.

There was also another reason I left the story alone…but it´s not something I want to post on publicly.

Another of those cold windy days when you promise yourself you´ll go out… and then the thought of what it will take to battle the  buses, the  mad motorists, and the wind overcomes you.

I contented myself with sitting on the couch, wrapped up, sipping mate and tapping out a piece on the recent ethics charges levied against Sarah Palin. I didn´t read the charges in any detail. I don´t care to. At this point, it´s clear that every media hack in the country enjoys sticking a knife into her. It´s not pretty.  Since when did small-town flute-playing moms provoke such visceral dislike? I did´t care for Ms. Palin as a candidate for Veep myself. But she´s no worse than many others. And if you think she had no experience,  then what about….oh well, never mind.

Sotomayor is another topic not worth bothering about. The whole debate over how to interpret the constitution is so stale I wonder it´s not on sale at a cheap supermarket. Under half-baked products.

Sotomayor is not going to rend the fabric of the nation. That´s already been done. She´ll probably go along in that muddled way that passes for being a ‘thoughtful´justice.

And that´s as it should be.

I´m all for a period of doing what´s been done. And if the only conservation going on is the conservation of liberal achievements, then so be it. Continuity is still a good thing. The settled law of the land is still the settled law of the land.  We´ve suffered from enough revolution- through- the- courts for me to believe that conservatives should adopt the same judicial activisim in turn.

Libertarians sometimes like to talk about radical capitalism. But to me, capitalism isn´t radical in its essence. It´s conservative. What it conserves is time. The frequent observation that capitalism ¨speeds” up time (you´ll find it in much modern political theory) is true enough at one level. But at another level, capitalism is backward-looking, not just forward looking. It concretizes our past actions, preserves them.

There are many libertarians who like to call  themselves radicals, but I´m not one of them. I like to call myself a tory-bohemian. A traditionalist as to forms. An agnostic and skeptic as to substance.

This makes me fond of style…convention.  Style is not everything, but it´s more than the left realizes. Style is our conversation with the past.

The past is important to me. Very important. And the kind of capitalism that uproots the past and overturns everything in its path is only one face of capitalism — it´s corporatism, gigantism – the out growth of state intervention.

I like to think that  without massive state intervention, capitalism would emerge as something entirely different.

To return to Sotomayor. The court´s been political for decades. Pretending this is something new and not to be tolerated is simply silly. Let the courts go where they wish.

Pat Buchanan gained nothing by opposing Sotomayor for being an activist. I saw him debate Rachel Maddow on her show,  and Maddow cleverly limited her argument to repeating that 108 out of 110 Supreme Court justices had been white males. She knew that one fact was enough.

And she´s right. Demographics have changed, and the court is expected to reflect demographics. Buchanan argued that justices are supposed to be picked for their mastery of legal analysis.  But anyone who´s read case law knows how convoluted the arguments are.  They´re mostly political…and sophistical. And often bogus.

So, arguing for some kind of mastery of bogus ¨legal science¨ isn´t nearly as effective as arguing for what the population wants. And Rachel Maddow is a smart cookie who knows how to argue effectively. It´s as simple as that.

Conservatives would do better to focus on society and forget the courts.

In the news:

“To learn more about this faint visible light, scientists in Japan employed extraordinarily sensitive cameras capable of detecting single photons. Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.

The researchers found the body glow rose and fell over the day, with its lowest point at 10 a.m. and its peak at 4 p.m., dropping gradually after that. These findings suggest there is light emission linked to our body clocks, most likely due to how our metabolic rhythms fluctuate over the course of the day.

Faces glowed more than the rest of the body. This might be because faces are more tanned than the rest of the body, since they get more exposure to sunlight – the pigment behind skin color, melanin, has fluorescent components that could enhance the body’s miniscule light production.

Since this faint light is linked with the body’s metabolism, this finding suggests cameras that can spot the weak emissions could help spot medical conditions, said researcher Hitoshi Okamura, a circadian biologist at Kyoto University in Japan….”

More here.

My Comment:

And when yogis, religious teachers, alternative practitioners, spiritualists and psychics for centuries described and even drew auras, they were laughed at and called charlatans and liars out to make a buck.

Many people have trained themselves to pick up on these sorts of emanations. I had a friend, a medical intuitive, who accurately diagnosed diseases from them.

Anyone with a little intuition or even a connection to another human being can pick up thoughts, emotions, images, and ideas from them. I’ve had close friends whose minds I could literally read. It wasn’t a faculty within my control. But I was aware of it. There is nothing “supernatural” about this, as aggressive materialists like to argue. It’s simply the use of faculties that most people ignore, scorn, or suppress. Animals use them. “Primitive” people (who are often far more advanced than the “civilized” on many counts) use them. Artists use them. Great scientists rely on them.

It’s only the chattering class that shapes popular culture with its own naive ideas of ‘science’ that seems oblivious to the existence of these dimensions of our existence.

Time for their brainwashing to end.